IV.
Progress?
fourth year
I sat down at the computer. I stared at the screen. The quiet of children reading was punctuated by muffled noises from the hallway. I didn’t even know where to start, but I knew I had to tell someone. “I just put a kid in an invisible box,” I typed, “and he stayed there.”
~~~~~~~~~~
When I got the phone call five days before the beginning of my fourth year of teaching informing me that I would be moving from fourth grade back up to fifth grade, I knew I’d have some of the same students again. I had six of them to be exact; and Chris was one of them. Colleagues and union reps offered to plead my case for me, untenured as I was. “No one should be forced to have a child with that many problems two years in a row,” but I politely refused. I didn’t believe in fate or accidents, and there was some purpose for this particular child to be in my classroom again. Plus, this was a kid I genuinely enjoyed, on his lucid days, anyways. He wasn’t purposefully malicious, didn’t seem to intentionally disobey, just couldn’t handle life in a typical classroom.
It became apparent a few days into the school year that some maturing had taken place over the summer. He’d gone from his first year in fourth grade, crawling on the floor, barking and sometimes biting people to his second year in fourth grade, sometimes barking but never biting anyone, to fifth grade, occasionally crawling on the floor, but no biting or barking. Progress.
Except that most days, Chris still couldn’t function. This year I decided to try removing him from the eight other boys in my room who loved to encourage him. Many days he ended up in the hallway; I didn’t always get him there in time.
My room was situated on the second floor of our building, at the top of the stairs. Any class coming from the ground floor used that staircase when traveling to Art, Computers, or Library. Added to that, the office was across the hall from my room; parents and students were back and forth all day long.
On one otherwise normal day, Chris began coping with some perceived problem during class by shredding paper and making towers and streets on his desk with it. This would have been fine, except for the sounds of a city being constructed on his desk. I asked him to please wait for me at the back of the room. Loud noises continued to find their way to the front of the room as construction continued, this time with books and other refuse. His next step was the hallway. I carefully propped the door open and attempted to continue teaching. From my position near the desk of another student, I heard him, then heard another class on their way to the library. I maneuvered myself to a position where I could keep one eye on the hall and one eye on the teaching moment I was having with another student. What I saw embarrassed me: Chris, rolling back and forth across the narrow hall, forcing other students to hop over him, or somehow quickly run around him as they went by.
Asking the rest of the class to take out silent reading books, I marched into the hallway, ready to yell, but knowing that wouldn’t do any good. Instead, I spotted two desks, reserved for kids who liked working in the hallway, sitting about three feet apart on the wall opposite the door. Moving Chris to his feet, I gently placed him between the desks. “Chris,” I said, “I’ve just made a box for you. There’s an invisible line between these two desks, and you may not cross it.” I stood back to watch. With a slight yelp, he flung himself at the invisible wall, hands extended mime-style, feeling the “walls” of his new cage. I went back and sat down where I could discreetly watch. Mrs. Hilliard’s class came through on their way to art. Chris leaped, snarling, but stopped short at the invisible wall. He felt the wall with his hands, growled at those walking by, but stayed behind the wall. I shook my head. Even on the bad days, he was so clever, so entertaining. I couldn’t help but like this kid.
Still, this was not enough progress for me to feel comfortable feeding him to the wolves at the middle school with absolutely no support.
I approached our school-family liaison and interim principal. District policy stated that I should take Chris’s case in front of the Teacher Assistance Team to determine whether testing him was the best option. I had followed the rules the first year I had Chris. I didn’t want to take this child’s name before the Team a second year and be told, again, that his home life had damaged him beyond repair and there was nothing anyone could do. I explained to the principal that I’d like to approach his mom about having the school psychologists do some testing with Chris, to see what kinds of help we could give him to help prepare him for middle school. When she heard of the dog days, the daily removals from the room, and the invisible box, the interim principal gave her blessing.
I approached mom from the perspective of wanting Chris to have the most successful middle school experience possible. Even after repeating a grade, he had not improved enough, and we needed more information if we were to be able to help him. Mom agreed.
So began the revolving door of adults in my room. Three different school psychologists, the occupational therapist, a physical therapist, and a speech therapist, just to name a few. They all came to observe Chris in his unnatural habitat. They agreed, every single one, that something was not right, but that was where the agreement ended. Some said “Oppositional Defiant,” some said, “Emotionally Impaired,” still others said, “Autistic.” Our resident psychologist shared with me that this was, by far, the most difficult evaluation she’d ever been involved with. In the end, they finally had to sit down with the manual for definitions of disabilities provided by the Department of Education. As a team, they went through the parameters of each disability, looking at test results and observations to determine fit. At last, the diagnosis was settled. High functioning Asberger’s Syndrome.
Would he have been tested if he had been in another classroom? It’s hard to say. The teacher would most likely have followed protocol, taken his name before the panel of teachers to get suggestions. They would most likely have been told again that home was so messed up there was no point in testing. Chris may have gone to middle school with no evaluation, no diagnosis.
But in this district, a diagnosis of Asberger’s Syndrome got you a teacher consultant who’d meet with you twice a month, a half hour at a time. Maybe a few accommodations listed on an IEP, which teachers might or might not read. So had I really helped him?
One of the benefits and one of the downfalls of living in a small town with a small school system is that even after kids leave our building, we still hear about them. So I kept up on Chris. I heard about his initial mix of good and bad days. Of teachers who found him amusing when he stood up in the middle of class with an imaginary camcorder, videotaping classmates. Then I heard about his further withdrawal. How a navy blue hoodie became his uniform of choice. He’d sit in the back of the class, hood up, interacting with no one. I heard about the meeting attended by all of Chris’s teachers; one stood up and fought for accommodations for this child, while the rest continued repeating, “We have a hundred other students a day. We’re supposed to change the way we do things for just one kid?”
~~~~~~~~~~
I saw Chris just one final time. The meeting showed that the progress he’d made in two years with me hadn’t been enough.
It was a warm, April day. Over a year had passed since he’d been in my class. I stood outside the new elementary building, policing children anxious to be on the bus home. A tall, thin boy wearing a blue hoodie exited bus 00-7 and headed for me. I didn’t recognize him at first, but as he approached, I realized it was Chris.
“Hey, Chris, how are you?”
He looked at the ground, unwilling or unable to meet my gaze and mumbled, “Can I get a pop?”
“If it’s OK with your bus driver,” I sighed. I had been foolish to assume the connection was still there.
He loped into the building, bought a Pepsi, and returned to the bus, without so much as a wave or a glance in my direction.
